The JRuby-extras project is proud to announce the release of version 0.2
of ActiveRecord-JDBC.
This release brings much needed functionality and usability. Since
0.0.1, the project have gone from proof-of-concept to something that’s
actually usable.
ActiveRecord-JDBC now supports migrations and connections with 8
databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, Derby,
FireBird and HSQLDB.
Most of the standard functionality in ActiveRecord works with these
databases, and Migrations are also there except for those cases when the
database cannot support the operation.
Question - for those of us on Unix based OSs like MacOS X, what is the best
way to connect to SQL Server for Rails apps?
I’ve got a system setup to use ODBC but this seems like a simpler
alternative.
Any idea of performance differences between the solutions?
If you’re on a platform that doesn’t support ODBC very well (basically
anything non-Windows) the Rails + ActiveRecord-JDBC + SQL Server JDBC
driver should always work without much fuss. It’s the same code
everywhere, so it will work on any platform where Java’s supported.
We haven’t done much benchmarking, but it breaks down like this: JRuby
is still about twice as slow as Ruby for pure interpreted code
(sometimes more in odd cases), but database access over JDBC should be
as fast or faster than anything C-based (as the existing Rails
adapters are). Database IO speed is a strong point for Java, so it
helps to offset remaining performance issues in JRuby.
Yeah, as I stated in the message, we have ODBC setup and it works. The
setup
is a pain and the tools aren’t great so I thought I would ask if this
was a
better solution. Sounds like there’s still some overhead but it is great
to
have options.